Four Flies

Porter’s few watercolors are mostly still lifes of fruit and floral subjects, yet he completed several distinctive depictions of butterflies and insects in circular format. In this example, four flies are poised momentarily on a plate, a witty trompe l’oeil (fool-the-eye) invitation to viewers to question illusion versus reality. Porter rendered each fly with great precision, working deftly with opaque blue and green watercolor to highlight their volumetric forms, and using transparent black watercolor to indicate wings and legs, as well as cast shadows. When the artist exhibited his painted flies at a Hartford, Connecticut, gallery in 1879, one reviewer noted these “microscopic studies” were best admired with the aid of a magnifying glass.